Video games: A pair of new cinematic adventures

Phantom Blade Zero

The latest game from the Chinese studio S-Game “plays like something straight out of a wuxia epic,” said Travis Northup in IGN. The Chinese fantasy genre pioneered the kind of sword fighting you’ll relish while playing as a martial arts fighter who has just 66 days of life left to seek vengeance. As the clock runs down, you battle “all manner of beast and badass” spread over eight maps, each filled with side quests, treasure, and secrets. “Precise parry-and-dodge mechanics” accompany a system of upgrades that roll out so smoothly you slip into them “like a tailored set of flowing wuxia robes.” I could quibble about “occasional performance issues,” but there were few moments across 50 hours of playing time when I wasn’t “absolutely thrilled.” In every smile-inducing fight, my present foe and I “weave graceful tapestries of blocks, lunges, dodges, and violently flamboyant strikes,” said Luke Kemp in GamesRadar+. That’s partly owing to the motion-capture contributions of Donnie Yen, a legend of kung fu cinema. Satisfyingly, the action unfolds in a realm that “subtly fuses supernatural horror, Chinese mythology, and a hint of the modern world.”

Silver Pines

Silver Pines could be a lost David Lynch movie from the 1990s,” said Keith Stuart in The Guardian. You play this survival horror game from a Scandinavian studio as private eye Red Walker, trying to track down a missing musician in a fog-veiled deserted town filled with “fizzing neon signs.” Like a Lynch sleuth, Red energizes by guzzling black coffee, the better to explore buildings and other locations “loaded with detail.” And though some of the gameplay feels “incredibly familiar,” this homage to neo-noir stands apart from other point-and-click adventures with its “brilliant sense of style” and “wonderfully constructed” mythology. “Every moment I spent in Silver Pines felt delightfully eerie and meaningful,” said Stephanie Watel in Dualshockers. While you eventually do battle with otherworldly monsters, the game excels most at imbuing a player with “that compelling urge to discover what’s in the next room.” Solving certain puzzles required “substantial running around,” but “Silver Pines itself is so mesmerizing to look at that I honestly didn’t mind.”